Tutorials

The tutorials will guide you along most features of the program using some real examples that you can
follow step by step. Along the way information is given to help you get the most out of Voca. In the
tutorials you can recognise the actions to perform by a bullet ().

Create a word list

In this tutorial you will learn how to create a new word list and how to enter some words.

When you start Voca, you will first see a splash screen. Just click in it to make it disappear. Then you will
see the following screen.

Click the new word list button in the tool bar:

It will show the following dialogue.

We will create a French word list.

Enter French at the foreign language.

Enter English at the reference language.

There are more screens where you can set more properties, but for now we will accept the default settings
for them.

You can always change what you fill in here by choosing Word List | Properties from the main menu.

Click Finish.

Now you will see an empty word list. The words are displayed in rows and each word consists of several
fields, which you can see in the columns.
For a better view we will hide the columns that we dont use in this tutorial.

Right-click in the column headers.

This opens a menu with all available columns. The visible columns are checked.

Uncheck the columns Context, Pronunciation, Grammar, Sound, Image and Page.

If you want to move a column, you can just drag the column header with your mouse. You can resize a
column by dragging the right edge of the column, but some columns cant be resized.

Your window should look similar to the one below.

Lets enter some words. In the window below you see a short French word list, which we will create.
Note that the word sentir appears twice with different English translations.
 Enter the words in the window above.

Basically you can enter the words in two ways. First you could enter all the French words first and then
all the English translations. After typing a French word press Enter to go to the next line. Then click in
the English column next to the first French word, so you can enter the translations. After typing a
translation press Shift+Enter to go to the next row.

Alternatively you could enter a French word, then its translation, then the next French word and its
translation, and so on. After typing a French word press Tab to go to the English column. After typing a
translation press Enter to go to the start of the next row.

If you dont know how to type the character on your keyboard, you can use the foreign characters bar at
the bottom of the window. More information about foreign characters is given in the users guide.

When you have entered a French word and its translation, you will see that an empty score bar becomes
visible. This means that when you start an exercise, this word can be asked. Its current score is 0.
Now we will set the parts of speech of the words. The first three words are nouns. The other words are
verbs.

Select the first three words. First click in the row header at the left of word 1. Then hold Shift and
click in the row header of word 3.
Right-click in one of the selected row headers and choose Set Part of Speech.

You will see the set part of speech dialogue.

Enter n (for noun) or choose it from the list. Then click OK.
Do the same to set the part of speech of the other words to v (for verb).

We will also divide the words into three lessons. The first three words will be in lesson 1, the next four
words (4 to 7) in lesson 2, and the last three words will be in lesson 3.
 Select the first three words.
Right-click in one of the selected row headers and choose Set Lesson.

You will see the set lesson dialogue, which is similar to the set part of speech dialogue.

Enter 1 and click OK.

Do the same to set the lesson of the next four words to 2 and the last three words to 3.

Finally your word list should look like the picture below.

Save your list to the file French.wdl.

In the next tutorial you will use it again.

Sort and filter

In this tutorial you will learn how to sort words and how to use filters.

The sort and filter functions help you manage your word list. You can use them to find words, adapt your
view, and most importantly, select the words that you want to appear in an exercise.

Open the word list that you saved in the last tutorial.

You can sort words by clicking a column header. Lets sort the English words in alphabetical order.
 Click the header of the English column.

Note that you cant properly sort the list on French words, because the nouns are preceded by their article
le. If you want a word list that you can sort on French words, you could put the articles after a noun, for
example vin, le. But then you would also have to type the words like that in an exercise.

Your window should now look like the screenshot below. At the right of the English column header, you
see a triangle pointing down. This means that the list is sorted on the English column in ascending order.
The column name is underlined because the sorting is up-to-date, which is obvious since we have just
sorted the list.

Its easy to group the words by part of speech or lesson. Just sort the list on the respective columns. Lets
group the words by lesson.

Click the header of the Lesson column.

Note that within each lesson, the words are still sorted on English words. If you want the last lesson
(lesson 3) at the top, you can sort on descending order.

Click the header of the Lesson column again.

Now the triangle in the header of the lesson column is pointing up. Within each lesson the order of the
words still hasnt changed.
Another way of changing the order of the words, is by manually moving them. You can move a word by
clicking a row header and dragging the mouse. We will move the word le vin (at the bottom) to the top.

Press the left mouse button in the row header of le vin. A thick black line appears. Drag the
mouse up until the black line is at the top of the list (see the picture below). Then release the
mouse.

Note that Lesson is not underlined anymore, because the list is currently not sorted on lesson, but the
triangle is still there. If you want to re-sort the list on lesson, just click the column header again.

A special column that we havent mentioned yet, is the first column (#) with the sequence numbers. You
may have noticed that after sorting the list, each word kept its sequence number. This allows you to return
to the original sorting at any time, by sorting on sequence number.

Click the header of the # column.

When the list is sorted on sequence number and you move a word, the word wont keep its number, but
the numbers are updated, so the list remains sorted on sequence number.

Move the word couter one word up as shown in the following screen.

After this the word couter will have number 8 and the word parler will have number 9.
If the list is not sorted on sequence number, you can renumber the list by choosing Word List |
Renumber in the main menu. When you have manually changed the order of words, renumbering is a
way to save your current order.

Now we will look at filters. They allow you to show only some words that match certain criteria, and hide
all the other words. As an example we will filter the word list so that only words in lesson 2 are shown.
 Click the filter button in the tool bar:

This shows the filter bar with check boxes for the available filters (filters for hidden columns are not
available).

Check the Lesson filter.

The lesson filter is activated. At the left of the window you will see its panel where you can set the filter
properties.

Click on 2 in the lesson filter panel.

Now you will only see the words in lesson 2. You could select more lessons by holding down Ctrl or
Shift when you click on a lesson.

At the bottom of the window you see that 4 words are shown and the unfiltered list contains 10 words.

You can apply any set of filters. When you apply more than one filter, the filtered words will match the
criteria of all filters. For example we can combine the filters Part of speech and French to filter verbs
ending with -er. This is shown in the next window.
 Uncheck Lesson in the filter bar to disable the lesson filter.
Check the Part of speech filter.
Click on v in the part of speech filter panel. The window will show all verbs.
Check the French filter.
Choose Ends with from the list in the filter panel.
Enter er and click Apply.

You see that its easy to find words using filters, but filters are also used to select the words you want to
appear in an exercise. Thats what you learn in the next tutorial.

Save the word list.

Practise words
In this tutorial you will learn how to start an exercise and you will learn about scores.

Open the word list that you saved in the last tutorial.

If you still had the filters applied when you saved the word list, you will see that they are still active when
you open the word list again. When you start an exercise, all words that are currently visible can be asked.
We will practise the words in lesson 2, so first we need to apply filters so that only the words in lesson 2
are visible.
 If you dont see the filter bar, click the filter button in the tool bar:
Check the Lesson filter and uncheck all other filters.
In the lesson filter panel, click 2.

Now your window should look like the picture below and youre ready to start the exercise.

Click the exercise button in the tool bar:

Below you see the exercise window consisting of four panels. The question is in the top left panel.

You can resize a panel by moving your mouse over the border between two panels and then drag the
mouse.

In fact this is an exercise where you have to check your answers yourself. You may type your answer just
for yourself so you can check it more easily, but you dont have to.
 If you want, enter your answer in the answer panel at the bottom left.
Click Show Answer or press Enter.

The window will show the correct answer and you can indicate whether your answer was correct.
 Click Y or press Y or Enter on your keyboard if your answer was correct. Otherwise click or
press N.

Your score is updated and the next question is shown.

In the score panel at the bottom right you see three bars. The first bar shows the score of the current
question. At every correct answer, your score for that question increases. At a wrong answer, your score
goes back to zero and then it can even go negative. You master a word when you have reached score 2.

You can change the mastered score, which by default is two correct answers, in the exercise settings (in
the main menu choose Word List | Exercise Settings, then go to the tab Other settings).

For negative scores, the bar extends to the left in red. For positive scores the bar extends to the right in
green. When you master the question, the bar is full and turns dark green. Your goal is to master all
words. When you have achieved that, Voca will tell you, so you can stop practising and take an exam.

Each field of a word has its own score. In this exercise there are actually two kinds of questions.
Sometimes you have to give the English translation of a French word. Other times you have to give the
French translation of an English word. The score that you see in the window above, is the score of the
English field, because thats what youre asked for. You master the word only when you master both the
French field and the English field.

Sometimes the score bar can be full but still be light green. Thats because the score bar shows an average
over all answer fields for the current question. In our example we have only one answer field (either the
French word or the English word), but suppose we also had the grammar field. It could happen that the
average score is 2 (the mastered score, so the score bar is full), but the score of the French word is 3
(mastered) and the grammar score is 1 (not mastered).

The scores also play a role in the way Voca selects questions. Any question has a chance of being
selected, even questions that you already master, but questions with a low score have a higher chance of
being selected, and unmastered questions have an extra high chance. This means that difficult words will
appear more often than easy words.

In the exercise settings you can change the maximum number of mastered words that appear in an
exercise. If you dont want to see mastered words at all, you can set it to 0%.

Do you remember that the French word sentir has two meanings: feel and smell? When youre asked
to translate sentir, only one translation is the intended answer, but Voca will show you both answers. If
you didnt know the intended answer, your score for that answer will decrease. If you didnt know the
other answer, your score for that answer wont change. But if you knew the other answer, your score for
that answer will increase. So you can give two answers to one question at once.

When you create a word list, dont put two words in one field, but just create two entries like we did for
sentir.

Your word list may even contain words that are exactly the same. Voca will treat those duplicates as one
word. So to master them, you only need to answer them correctly twice, not four or six times (twice for
every duplicate).
You could continue the exercise until Voca tells you that you have mastered all words, but for now we
will return to the word list.

Click the edit word list button in the tool bar:

Your window should look like the picture above. Note that the last word in the exercise is now selected in
the word list. This allows you to easily edit a word that you see during an exercise.

More importantly, you see that the bars in the Score column look different now. They show the progress
you made during the exercise. When you save the word list, these scores are saved, so you can continue
any time later.

Sometimes you want to reset the scores to zero.

In the main menu choose Edit | Select All or press Ctrl+A.

Right-click in one of the row headers and choose Reset Scores.
Save the word list.
You have seen an example of an exercise with self-check, from French to English and from English to
French. In the next tutorial you will see other kinds of exercises.

Exercise types
In this tutorial you will learn how to activate different kinds of exercises.

An exercise type has two aspects: (1) how should you give your answers, and (2) what answers should
you give. In the last tutorial we saw the default exercise type, in which you had to type check your
answers yourself (1) and you had to translate French words to English as well as the other way round (2).
But there are more types of exercises.

Open the word list that you saved in the last tutorial.
In the main menu choose Word List | Exercise Settings.

You will see the following window with available exercise types.

Voca comes with a range of predefined exercise types, but the exercise types are fully customisable. You
can modify the predefined types or create new types of your own. More information is given in the users
guide.
There are three ways of how you should give your answers:

1. Self-check. You should think of the answer or type it in. When you click a button, Voca will show
the correct answer and you need to indicate whether your own answer was correct.
2. Open questions. You should type in the answer yourself. When you click a button, Voca will
check whether your answer is correct.
3. Multiple choice. You will see four possible answers. You should choose one of them and Voca
will check whether your choice is correct.

The window shows all available exercise types, but you can use the filter menu at the top to show only
exercise types for one way of answering.

Lets start an exercise with open questions and this time we will only translate French words to English.

Double-click on Open questions: From French to English, so it is activated (it turns bold).
Click OK.

Click the exercise button in the tool bar:

The window looks similar to a self-check exercise, but at the bottom you will see the button Check. Now
you have to type in your answer, because Voca will check it for you.

Enter your answer.

Click Check or press Enter.

The window will show the correct answer and check whether your answer was correct. Your score is
updated.
 Click Next or press Enter for the next question.

What if youre asked to translate sentir? Should you answer feel or smell? You can enter either
translation or both, separated with a comma (,) or semicolon (;). Only one translation is the intended
answer, but Voca will check if you entered another correct translation. If you didnt enter the intended
answer, you will get another chance. If you enter only one answer, Voca will still show you all the other
answers as well.
Now we will try a multiple choice exercise.

In the main menu choose Word List | Exercise Types.

Double-click on Multiple choice: Both directions.
Click OK.

In the answer box you will see a list of possible answers and you should select one of them. This is shown
in the following screen (in this example we select a wrong answer).
 Click on your answer or press the number of your answer on the keyboard.

Your answer is checked and you will see the result. If the answer is wrong, as in our example, the screen
will look like the one below.
 Click Next for the next question.

After enough practise, Voca will tell you that you master all words, so its time to start an exam.

Save the word list.

Take an exam
In this tutorial you will learn how to take an exam.

When youve had enough practice, youre ready to take an exam. Lets take an exam with the words in
lesson 2, which we practised.

Open the word list that you saved in the last tutorial.

In this example we will still use the exercise type Multiple choice: Both directions, which should still be
active.

Click the exam button in the tool bar:

You see that the exam window is very similar to the practice window. The only difference is the score
panel at the right bottom. It contains two bars. The first bar shows your current score, an average over all
questions so far. The second bar shows how many questions the exam consists of, and how many
questions you have already answered. In this example there are only eight questions, because no more
questions are possible with four words and two directions. Normally Voca tries to select twenty questions.

You can change the number of questions in an exam in the preferences. From the main menu choose Edit
| Preferences.

Follow the exam and answer all questions.

In the end you will see your result and then you will return to the word list.
Now you know how exercises and exams work. In the next tutorial we will explore a new word list field:
the grammar field.

Grammar tests
In this tutorial you will learn about the grammar field and how to use it in an exercise.

In the grammar field you can set grammatical properties of a word. This is especially useful to learn
inflections. Some languages are more complicated than others, but most languages have some sort of
inflection, meaning that a word changes according to its grammatical role. Examples in English are the
past tense and past participle of a verb, or the plural form of a noun. Words can often be inflected by
applying rules, but usually irregularities exist. You can use the grammar field for both regular inflections
(to practise applying the rules) and irregular inflections (to memorise them).

For easy understanding, we will create a new English-only word list with the past tense and past participle
of some irregular verbs.

Click the new word list button in the tool bar:

Enter English for the foreign language.
Enter Meaning for the reference language.

We could enter English for both the foreign language and the reference language, but then we would get
two English columns, which can be confusing.
 Click Next until you are at screen 4, the grammar screen.

In this screen you can define the categories of grammatical properties for each part of speech. Here we
will define the categories past tense and past participle for verbs.

Click on v for verb in the part of speech list on the left.

Click in the text field under New and enter past tense.
Click Add or press Enter.
Enter past participle and press Enter.

Now your window should look as shown below.

 Click Finish. You will see the new empty word list.

You can always change your word list settings by choosing Word List | Properties from the main menu.

Hide all columns except #, English, Part of speech and Grammar (right-click in the column
headers).

Your window should look as shown below, without the words. We made the grammar column wider,
because it will contain a long text.

Enter the words in the English column as in the screen above.

Select all words.
Right-click in one of the row headers and choose Set Part of Speech. The part of speech dialogue
appears.
Enter v (for verb) or choose it from the list. Then click OK.

Until now it should have been familiar. Now lets fill in the grammar fields. The past tense and past
participle of the first verb, to go, are went and gone.

Click in the grammar field for the first verb.

The window above should appear. Because we defined the verb categories past tense and past
participle and we have already set the part of speech, you see that the categories automatically appear in
the window. The cursor is in the Value box, so you can enter the past tense right away.

Type went.
Press Enter so that the past participle category is selected.
Type gone.
Press Enter twice to close the dialogue.

Your word list should look as shown below. The dotted rectangle shows that the grammar field has the
focus.
You can also open the grammar dialogue with your keyboard by pressing the space bar when the
grammar field has the focus. We will try this to fill in the grammar field of the next words.

Press the down arrow key on your keyboard. The dotted rectangle moves to the grammar field for
the next word, to tell.
Press the space bar.
Enter the past tense and past participle: told, told.
Do the same for to give: gave, given.

Finally your word list should look as shown above. To use the grammar field in an exercise, we need to
activate the correct exercise type.

From the main menu choose Word List | Exercise Settings.

Double-click on Open questions: Grammar test.
Click OK.

Now you are ready to start the grammar test.

Click the exercise button in the tool bar:

The exercise is similar to other exercises you saw. In these tutorials we didnt have a look at all possible
fields and exercises, but now you should know enough to try for yourself. Otherwise you can find more
information in the users guide.

Upload a word list

In this tutorial you will learn how to upload your word list to the Voca website, so that other users
can download it.

Typing in all the vocabulary for a language course is a time-consuming job and your work can be very
welcome for other people. So when you have created a word list, you are encouraged to share it at this
website.

Before you can upload word lists, you will need to create a My Voca profile. Your uploads will bear your
user name, through which other people can contact you at the forum. You can upload word lists at your
My Voca page, but in this tutorial you will learn how to upload a list directly from Voca.

Open the word list that you want to upload.

Click the upload button in the tool bar:

Voca will first download a database of languages and then show the following dialogue.
In this dialogue you need to select the foreign language and reference language from the database. Voca
will try to find the languages using the language names that you entered when you created the word list. If
the detected language is not correct, click the Change button. It will open a dialogue in which you can
browse the language database. You see a picture of this dialogue below.
If you cant find the language, you can check Other. You can also do this if you didnt create a
vocabulary list but, for instance, a list with capitals of countries in the world.

A selection from the language database enables the unique identification of a language, even if word list
creators use different languages or spellings to specify the language names. This way, word lists with the
same language can be grouped together, and the language names can be presented to you in English.

Click OK to upload the list.

You may be asked to enter your user name and password first. If you upload a list with the same name as
another list you uploaded before, Voca will ask you if you want to overwrite the old list.

The uploaded word list will appear at your My Voca page, where you could edit or delete it.
Grammar
In the grammar field you can set grammatical properties of a word. This is especially useful to learn
inflections. Some languages are more complicated than others, but most languages have some sort of
inflection, meaning that a word changes according to its grammatical role. Examples in English are the
past tense and past participle of a verb, or the plural form of a noun. Words can often be inflected by
applying rules, but usually irregularities exist. You can use the grammar field for both regular inflections
(to practise applying the rules) and irregular inflections (to memorise them).

When you click in the grammar field, you will see the grammar dialogue (shown below). You can also
open the dialogue with the space bar when the grammar field has the focus (it shows a dotted rectangle as
in the picture above). The field gets the focus when you move to it with your keyboard, using the arrow
keys or Tab.

In this dialogue you can enter the grammatical properties of a word. Each property consists of a category
name and its value. The window above shows the grammar dialogue for the verb to go. It has two
properties of the categories past tense and past participle with the values went and gone.

When you select a category in the left box, you will see its value on the right. The dialogue was made so
that you can easily control it with your mouse or your keyboard. To select a category, you can click on it,
but you can also move between the categories and the New category field using the arrow keys up and
down or the Enter key.

You can move or delete categories using the buttons on the right.

If you want to change the value for a category, follow these steps:

Select the category (click on it or move to it with the arrow keys or Enter). The cursor will be in
the Value field.
 Type the new value.

To add a new category, follow these steps:

Go to the New category field (click in it or move to it with the arrow key down or Enter).
Type the category name.
Click Add or press Enter. The cursor will be in the Value field.
Type the value.

Templates

Usually words with the same part of speech have grammatical properties of the same categories. For
example verbs have a past tense and past participle, and nouns have a plural form. You can define these
common categories in templates.

When you set the part of speech of a word and then open the grammar dialogue, you will see that the
categories from the template are automatically loaded, so you only need to enter the values. If you had
already filled in some grammatical properties, the template will not be loaded automatically, but you can
easily load it with the button Load template.

You can define templates in the word list properties. From the main menu choose Word List |
Properties. Then open the tab Grammar.

In the left box you see the parts of speech defined in the tab screen Parts of speech. By default it shows
this list:

n noun
v verb
adj adjective
adv adverb
 pron pronoun
num numeral
prep preposition
other all other parts of speech

When you click on a part of speech, you will see its grammar categories in the box on the right. You can
define a new category with these steps:

Click on the part of speech.

Click in the text field under New.
Type the category name.
Click Add or press Enter.

In the screen above we have defined the grammar categories past tense and past participle for verbs
(v).